Wednesday 14 December 2011

Palpating Gripper Video

This is a video explaining the palpating gripper I have been developing as part of my work on augmenting robotic minimally invasive (keyhole) surgery with haptic (touch) feedback.



The basic premise of the work is that more tactile properties may be determined from an object if it can be actively explored using one or more fingers. To facilitate this sort of exploration inside the body I have been designing a robotic gripper that is simple enough to be manufactured for keyhole surgery but has enough dexterity to replicate some of the exploratory hand motions of a surgeon.

This work has been accepted for publication at IEEE Haptics Symposium 2012.